>* 22. GLENN:>> The tracks may not be>>random, the mutations are though. In a 3 dimensional cavern system, if you>>are in a cavern of 16 feet diameter by 100 feet long with one small opening>>at each end, you can only move 16 feet up or sideways before motion becomes>>impossible. If you are moving in a random fashion, you will bump into the>>wall. You path is only random within the cavern itself, not in the entire>>limestone bed. Eventually your random path will take you to one of the>>small exits. Once in that exit you are constrained to either move down the>>exit into the next cavern or back into the one you left. Movement is>>random, not the cavern! ...>> in the above analogy, the walls represent the genomes that die! One
cannot>>move in those directions so since the population can grow to fill the>>cavern, they can't occupy niches inside the "dna phase space cavern>>walls". But as the population fills the phase space of the cavern, some>>will eventually lie near the exits and if isolated, will speciate (go into>>the next cavern).>> [ CR: This is a clever, interesting analogy; do you know how Gould and>Dennett, respectively (see my earlier post), would evaluate its technical>plausibility? Just how convergent or divergent is evolutionary history? ]

Largely I think this is close to what the advocates of chaos theory applied
to biology like Stuart Kaufman would hold. However they treat Kaufman is
probably how they would evaluate this.